27: The Brain Science Approach to Prayer (Jumpstart Your Prayer Life, Part 4) | S4E27

(00:01) Stephanie Warner: Welcome to Season 4, episode 27. Hello, Father, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day week.

(00:06) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter. This is a really fun set of days. We got Pi Day, and the Ides of March.

(00:12) Stephanie Warner: We survived the Ides of March, so good job for that.

(00:16). Well, especially because when I was in junior high, I played Julius Caesar in the Shakespeare production. My friends got great joy in practicing, killing me every practice. So the Ides of March is very meaningful to me.

(00:32) Stephanie Warner: So you’re very happy to have survived.

(00:34) Marcus Warner: Yeah, I survived that. And now we have St. Patrick’s Day, so hence the green.

(00:40) Stephanie Warner: My goodness. Yes, we’re repping different greens today, but hopefully mine’s not too loud.

(00:45) Marcus Warner: I have more of a Robin Hood green going on.

(00:48) Stephanie Warner: I like Robin Hood. This is good.

(00:50)  Marcus Warner: Especially the Errol Flynn version.

(00:52) Stephanie Warner: Yes, the best. Thank you for that in print early in my life. I do want to give a quick announcement again. An invitation to you to join us for the online “name Your own price” conference all about healthy community. You can check out all of the details at https://deeperwalk.com/events. We hope to see you there. That’ll be a fun time. And I just want to get us straight into this topic. So the goal of this series… we’re in our Jumpstart Your Prayer Life series, and the goal is to help you go deeper on your walk with God, specifically in your prayer life. And for this series, we have a free Listening Prayer starter kit that you can download and print off. It’s going through three tactical approaches to your prayer life. So if you’re following along in it, we’re jumping to the brain science approach. We are jumping to the brain science approach coming out of our conversation from last episode.

If you missed that, I would encourage you to go back and listen to our brain science and prayer episode. But for this one we’re looking at tactical. So, Father, what is the brain science approach to prayer?

(02:20) Marcus Warner: I call it that mostly just to get people’s attention. What we’re talking about here is Immanuel  Journaling. It’s an approach that was developed by Dr. Jim Wilder and a group of his friends, Anna Kang and Sungshim Loppnow. They were trying to figure out, is there a pathway through conversational prayer that cooperates really well with the way the brain is designed? And they write about it in their book, Joyful Journey. And I will say I’ve done a lot of this type of praying in my life and found this tool very helpful. And so we’ll walk through what that tool is here, but also a little bit of the brain science behind it.

The idea is, if we really do need the relational part of our brain engaged, can we design a prayer pattern that is intended to cooperate with that? And then lo and behold, once you do that, you look and find this is kind of what happened with Moses and his experience. And it’s kind of what happened with Hagar when the angel met with her, they go through something like this. And so you begin to realize, that all right, once again, brain science is putting a spotlight on it, but the Bible actually was teaching something very similar all along.

(03:50) Stephanie Warner: It’s so much fun to read the Bible with a lens that makes new facets of it come to life. Like, I see what you did there, I see what’s going on there. This is great, let’s dig into the brain science again. We covered some of this before but I want to make sure that we get to the two main things. So what is The Joy Switch? We can shout out another friend’s book here.

(04:15) Marcus Warner:  Chris and Jen Coursey who are going to be at our conference at the end of the month, Chris wrote a book called, The Joy Switch. I just always put my thumb on the side of my head and picture it like a switch that can go up or down. He and I explain it similarly, but with a little bit of different terminology here and there. I explain it that when my switch is on, then the higher levels of my brain function can operate smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. I teach that we can tell if our switches are on with CAKE. Do I have curiosity? Do I have appreciation? Do I have kindness? Do I want to make eye contact? Or do I feel like looking away and not actually connecting with anybody?

Those are like the four tests that say, if the answer to those is no, that means my switch is off. The good news is, to get my switch back on, I got to find some of them. And so it’s in prayer that I’m curious about God’s perspective. I’m curious about how God feels. I’m curious about people outside of myself. I have appreciation for God. I’m trying to find some sense of kindness and God helping me to be kind sometimes when I don’t feel like it.

So sometimes the prayer is even the process by which I am reclaiming these things that have gone off line. God will you help me find some curiosity, appreciation, and kindness. So that’s the idea of the switch. If I can get that switch on before I dive into prayer, there’s a much better chance that I’m going to feel relationally connected with God in my prayer time. So it’s pretty much that simple. Having the switch on increases the odds that I’m going to feel relationally connected to God. I’d say the other side of it is, if my switch is off God can still speak to me, but he’s got to supersede the system.

When God speaks to me when my switch is off, he might send an angel or a talking donkey, right?  He can get my attention even if my switch is off, but that’s pretty rare. So we’re looking at what is the normal way that God does this. And the normal way is to have my relational circuits on so that I can enter into the second thing we talk about, which is a mutual mind moment with God.

(06:52) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, and I’ll just say, I think of the joy switch as a dimmer switch too sometimes. Because sometimes you can still hear, you can feel a sense or a prompt, but you’ve got some guards up. Or you’ve got some things that you need to pull down.  But yes, a mutual mind, can we move on to that?

(07:13) Marcus Warner: Yeah, it’s an on-off switch with a dimmer function, no doubt. A mutual mind that we talked about last week. I’m tempted to just say, what does it mean to you? You’ve heard this explained so many times. When you think of mutual mind, what comes to mind?

(07:28) Stephanie Warner:  When I think mutual mind, I think straight back to a friend that I had in college. We literally would just sit across the table and talk and finish each other’s sentences. And we talk a lot about body language, but it goes beyond body language. It goes to that we know what’s going on in each other’s lives. I knew her so well and all the things  that she cared about and the things that were in the forefront of her mind. We could just make eye contact and have a whole conversation because we knew exactly what was going on around us.

I think this is another reason why consistent prayer and Bible study and all of that kind of stuff is so important, because mutual mind isn’t just about getting a sense from God that I got some “fuzzies”, so I know God’s with me. It’s like… how well are you getting to know God that you can rhyme your thoughts with him. I also think about God winks, which could be under the Joy Switch section too. Sometimes God will do things that are just very mundane, but I just sense that it was him, I just know.

(08:48) Marcus Warner: Yeah, a God wink, we should explain that right. It is just kind of God’s way of like, I see you, I know you, and I know this would be meaningful to you. It’s almost like an inside joke. Like, I know this would be meaningful to you. So yeah, I did this thing for you to notice. I’m glad you noticed that, it makes me happy. That’s kind of what you mean by a God wink. I think another term that gets thrown in as well is “rhyming thoughts.” And I don’t know how often we’ve explained “thought rhyming,” but it comes from Hebrew poetry. Hebrew poetry isn’t about actual sounds rhyming. So in English, we want the sounds to rhyme, like roses are red, violets are blue… I love you. We want the sounds to rhyme. In Hebrew poetry, they want the thoughts to rhyme.

And that means the first thought and the second thought are going to be related. They’re not just pure restatements of each other. The second thought often builds on and expands the first thought, or it might be in contrast to the first thought, but it’s going to be very much relationally dependent on that first thought. There’s going to be a connection between them. So Hebrew poetry can be described as thought rhyming versus sound rhyming. And that’s sort of what we’re doing in conversational prayer, we’re trying to get our thoughts rhyming with God’s thoughts. We’re trying to get our thoughts responding to and interacting with his. And that’s the goal. That’s what that means. That’s where that idea comes from.

(10:29) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. This is good. So let’s move on to some of that tactical work. Get out your journal,  get out your notebook. Sometimes you even talk about texting with God. I’m not good at this. I write epic fantasy novels. But it’s good to know that you have the permission to text God if you need to.

(10:50) Marcus Warner: Well, I was talking to Jim Wilder about this one time because he was like, yeah, I tend to do my Immanuel journaling in five minutes. My wife, when she was still with us, would take 45 minutes. Because some people think of it as a long connection time. It was he and his team that kind of came up with the idea that you could think of this as texting with Jesus. It takes a little bit of the pressure off of people like me. I don’t have to turn this into an hour long production which is what it would feel like if I were trying to do that. I can do this quickly. So yeah, we can walk through the process.

(11:34)  Stephanie Warner: So again, this is a process that was first laid out in Joyful Journey, by Jim Wilder and Anna Kang and John and Sungshim Loppnow. We often referred to it as Immanuel Journaling. So go ahead and give us the outline. What’s going on here?

(11:52) Marcus Warner: So it starts with something called interactive gratitude. And interactive gratitude is that you don’t just say thank you to God for something and move on. Find something that truly makes you smile, that you truly appreciate, and then ask God for a response to your gratitude. I’ve been in four states in the last week. I got a chance to appreciate a lot of different things about what it was like in Louisiana versus Texas, versus Colorado versus Indiana. And so it might sound weird, but we had perfectly blue skies every day in Colorado. I came back here and it’s been cloudy and overcast, but I’ve really been enjoying the cloudy and overcast weather. And last night we actually had thunderstorms and lightning. I’m like, I love this.

And so you might just pray something like, God thank you so much for thunderstorms in the beginning of March, and for the diversity of what’s out here.  And how do you respond to that, Jesus, what does that bring up for you? And from my mind the first thing that comes up is that it makes him smile. It makes him happy that it makes me happy, right? It brings him joy that something that he has done I can enjoy that much. It’s why he does it. He does this stuff for a lot of reasons. To put nitrogen in the air to put water in the ground to do all these other things. Part of it is just for my children who enjoy this sort of thing to be able to enter into that joy so that would be a start, that would be interactive gratitude. I don’t just say my thank you. I look for something and ask, how does this affect you God? What does it mean to you that I’m feeling this way?

(13:44) Stephanie Warner: I love the example of how you stated that you sank into that appreciation. You were like, I’m appreciating all the travel and all the things. It was not like you just said, okay, God, thank you for thunderstorms, all right now, how do you feel about thunderstorms? You entered into re-experiencing what it felt like to feel that. You could see the smile on your face that it was good.

(14:16) Marcus Warner: It’s funny, it’s like the first thunderstorm of the year. The first time that lightning flashed in the sky and I was like, I love thunderstorms. I think partly because they’re rare. You know, we don’t get them on a routine basis. And so it feels like something special is going on. So that’s one of them. I often find that when I’m stuck for something to appreciate, I start with the weather. I start with clouds a lot and the sky in general. Then I’ll go on to other things. But when I don’t have anything obvious in front of me, that’s usually what I might go to.

(14:55) Stephanie Warner: Alright, so after you have your back and forth of thanks with God, where do you go from there?

(15:02) Marcus Warner: So now we go into a five step process, and to remember this I think of it as a chiasm. They didn’t design it that way, but it helps me to think of it that way. For those who don’t know what that is, there’s an A followed by a B followed by a C, then you go back to B and back to A. That is more explanation than they need, but just think of it as moving out in an arrow. It goes out and then back. So the first one is…

(15:27) Stephanie Warner: With parallel.

(15:29) Marcus Warner: They’re parallel by letter. So this is really convoluted. I am probably confusing everybody. The first thing is ‘S’, I see you and then comes I hear you. So I will literally sometimes journal this out in an arrow. So I see you, I hear you, I know how big this is. That’s the middle one, it is basically the validation point. I know what the emotions are that you’re feeling. I know how big the emotions are and how it makes you feel. And then I have a parallel ‘H’. I’m happy that you’re sharing this with me. That parallels the ‘H’ of I hear you. And then, I’m strong enough to do something, which parallels the I see you ‘S’ at the beginning. So that’s how I remember it.  I see you, I hear you, I know you. I’m happy you’re bringing this to me. I’m strong enough to do something about it. And so that five step process is kind of the outline of Immanuel prayer after you do the interactive gratitude.

(16:27) Stephanie Warner: That’s awesome. And to clarify, in the beginning you’re saying, God, I’m thankful for this. And then you’re imagining or praying through, how would God respond to this? And then you get to the I see you, I hear you. This is as if Jesus is talking to you.

(16:44) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so you’re writing down as if Jesus is speaking to you, not with the idea that I am somehow getting a direct revelation from God. It’s just moving your perspective into that direction of what would God want me to know right now? So that’s kind of why I’m asking him, what do you want me to know about this right now? He says, well, I see you. And this can be as simple as, I see you sitting on the couch in the back room. I can see you outside on the back deck. I see you sitting in your car. And it can be that simple. Like with Hagar she said, it’s the God who sees me.

And he says, I see you there hiding by the well. God told Moses, I have seen the suffering of my people. I have seen what’s going on. So that’s kind of where this idea of, ‘I see you’ comes from. And don’t we all want to feel seen? We want to feel seen and we want to feel heard. So that’s the next one, I hear. And what I hear is the unspoken request in your heart. You may be asking for what you think you’re supposed to be asking for. But I know that even underneath that request there’s a deeper request of what you really want. And I hear you asking for this. And so it’s an opportunity for me to get past the surface level of what I think I ought to be asking for right now, and get in touch with the emotional level of what I really want to ask God for.

What’s really going on there? And so that puts it down at that level of ‘I hear you.’ It reminds me of, you may have heard the expression, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Well, the word desire there isn’t actually the word desire. That’s just the English trying to explain the Hebrew. In Hebrew that word is more like, I hear your heart requests. So your desire is your heart request. And I think when we say, I hear you, this is God saying, I see where you’re at right now. I hear your heart level request.

And it helps me to put that into words a little bit. That until I thought about it like this I didn’t realize what my heart  really is after, is this thing here. So that’s the second step. The third one is I know how big this is for you. And so this is like a validation step where God is saying, I know the emotion that it is giving you and I know how big that emotion is for you, and I’m recognizing it. It’s not God saying, I completely agree that you should be here. It’s validation. It’s God saying, I see where you’re at and I know how big this is. It’s part of feeling seen and heard by God and understood by him. So I feel seen, I feel heard, and I feel understood, then we get to the happy. And that’s where he is seeing me, hearing me, and understanding me and he is still happy to be with me.

Like, all right, this is going in a good direction. I like this and you’re not disgusted with me. You’re not done with me. You’re not ashamed of me. You’re not disappointed with me. You’re still happy that I’m bringing this to you, no matter how bad it is. Like, God, I think I’m ticked at you right now and I’m frustrated that you haven’t done more in my life.

You get Job saying things, like I wish you’d turn your face away from me. And God’s even happy you’re talking to him about this. At least we’re talking about it, right? So even when things are going that kind of direction, the idea is that God is happy that we’re bringing things to him, and happy that we are seeking him in the midst of it. And so that’s a nice reminder point there. And then finally you get to the I’m strong enough to part. I often start this with don’t worry, don’t worry. I’m strong enough. Don’t be anxious about this. I’m strong enough to. Then what you write next is frequently where you’re getting something that brings you some peace or some guidance, or this is what I want you to know about this.

This is what I’m planning to do about this. It’s going to be okay, kind of thing. And so that’s the process in a nutshell. So you start with interactive gratitude, and then you go through this kind of chiastic thing of, I see you, I hear you, I know you. I’m happy you’re bringing this to me. I’m strong enough to do something about it. And it’s designed to help us create a connection with God a little bit more quickly. The first prayer pattern I was ever taught was ACTS. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. I’m like, that’s fine, but it doesn’t actually flow, because you’re kind of going back and forth. Adoration and now confession, and then back to thanksgiving.

So it works, it’s fine. I don’t have a problem with it, but I like something like this as part of a routine that I put in there. It’s not that there’s one prayer pattern that you should always do and this will take care of every situation in which you want to pray, but it’s nice to have tools. So this is a great way to even start your prayer time, even if it’s not the only thing you do in your prayer time.

(22:41) Stephanie Warner: For sure, for sure. And I definitely encourage people that there are three different styles of prayer in this starter kit that we’ve got here. And you might be really familiar with one or two of them, but like set some times up with God and do this for a month. I’m gonna deliberately do a couple different approaches and just kind of learn and grow, and experience God and your relationship with him in new ways. And if something doesn’t work for you, it’s okay. You can be like, you know what, I meet with God best in this other way. But I think it’s always fun for me when I get to experiment. Like, I’m breaking out of my mold here.

I’m still talking to God and it’s not just all about my formula. So I know we need to wrap up here soon, but I do want you to just touch on discernment again with this. And we want to reiterate that the point with Listening Prayer and especially with switching over to praying as though Jesus is talking to you is not to say, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ The point is not to, as Dad said, and here is “1st Marcus”. Can you speak more to that father?

(24:09) Marcus Warner: You’re saying it well. I want to put myself in a position to connect as well as possible to pray. And sometimes we pray and we never feel any connection. And this is not a recipe for feeling connection, but it is in a sense a recipe for putting yourself in the best position for a connection. What I appreciate about it is that it follows the way the brain naturally operates by the desire to be seen and to be heard, to be understood. For somebody to be happy to be with us no matter what it’s all about. And then some kind of guidance and strength, and somebody who’s got a bigger brain than me, somebody who’s strong.

So I like the structure that it gives. And when I don’t know what to pray and I don’t know where to start, I will often turn to this as something to jumpstart my prayer time. Now in terms of, but that’s not specifically on discernment.The discernment piece here is that I’m not actually looking to get a prophetic word as I do this. I’m not looking to get a final verdict from God on something that I need to know. I’m just trying to include him in the process and not handle it all on my own.

(25:31) Stephanie Warner: And so for discernment, we talk about ‘If’ prayers and testing the spirits. We talk about, does this prayer and thinking lead me into the fruit of the spirit? And is it scriptural or does it counteract scripture? All these things. So we’ve talked about discernment before. I will again try to link some of those for us.

(25:54) Marcus Warner: If it’s a bigger decision, sometimes you’re going to go through this process multiple times before you’re going to act on it, because you want to see if that’s just the mood I was in that day. Or am I consistently getting the same message from God? So there’s different things that go into the process as well.

(26:11) Stephanie Warner: And getting godly counsel and all of that. Well this is a fun tool and we hope that it is impactful for you. And yeah, we’re pleased to offer it to you. Thank you for keeping us on the trail. Father, any closing thoughts for this episode?

(26:29) Marcus Warner: At the end of the day, we pray for a lot of reasons, right? We pray just because we have needs. We pray because we want to acknowledge our dependence. I routinely heard my dad open prayers with, God, we are a needy people. And that just really stuck with me. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t have needs and I’m coming to the Lord because I’m a needy person. I don’t want to get through this day without Him. So all the things that I can do to help with that connection, that’s the best. It makes prayer life better.

(27:08) Stephanie Warner: Well, I look forward to continuing on next week. We’re continuing our tactical approaches to prayer and we’ll see you then.